Intensive Summer Indigenous Program offered by UBC

UBC’s Okanagan campus is offering the Intensive Summer Indigenous Program, designed to provide students cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses that enhance their understanding of Indigenous artistic and theoretical practices.

This summer, UBC’s Aboriginal Programs and Services and Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies present two courses, both cross-listed as graduate and undergraduate offerings. Students with wide- ranging experiences from Indigenous Studies, Creative Studies, other UBC programs and institutions can receive credit. By offering these courses in a compressed format, students will focus on the material for an intensive period and receive full course credit.

Ashok Mathur, head of UBC’s Creative Studies Department, says "Indigenous Activist Art" is much more than a summer university course. “It's an opportunity for exhilarating change, a gathering of students, artists, and thinkers who will work and create together over an intensely charged 10 days,” says Mathur.

“It's a way of learning deeply from, about, and through Indigenous practices and ways of knowing. Participants and guests will enter this space as learners and will leave with a much enriched sense of what it means to collaborate with an incredible array of artists.”

Marlowe Sam

The courses are:

INDG 301/501, Examining an Indigenous Methodology: En'owkinwixw (UBC PhD graduate Marlowe Sam), from July 2 to July 18 on Monday/Wednesday/Friday from 1 to 5 p.m., at the En’owkin Centre in Penticton. This course provides an understanding of Indigenous strategy of community discourse as a methodology for inquiry, a technique of examination employing sequential stages of critical analysis in a whole-systems approach.

VISA 460/520, Indigenous Activist Art: (Associate Professors Stephen Foster and Ashok Mathur) from July 23 to Aug 1 daily, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (with a one-day break on Sunday, July 27). In this course students will investigate the methodologies and practices of Indigenous artists in contemporary contexts of creative activism, defined as artistic work that engages social and political issues of indigeneity. The focus of this compressed course will be on the intersections of art and activism – that is, how Indigenous artists engage social, political, regional, and global issues and communities through their art. The immersive environment – five hours per day for a nine-day period – will create a learning environment to encourage in-depth exploration of the traditions, methods, and practices of studio artists including Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Metis/German/Polish); David Garneau (Metis); Peter Morin (Tahltan); Mimi Gellman (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi Métis / Ojibway-Jewish Métis) and others who will be in residence during this week and will work closely with the students in a face-to-face environment.